Long idle/preparation: what the heck is it doing?

[tsluyter]

Hey guys!

 

While going through our backup logs I noticed that last night's backup had taken quite a lot of time. And strangely enough the time spent on idling/preparing was up the wazoo! For example:

Code:

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- 9/21/2005 8:13:58 PM: Copying / on nl-ams99a-das01

9/21/2005 8:13:58 PM: Connected to nl-ams99a-das01

MapError: unknown Windows error -2,147,221,504

9/21/2005 8:39:47 PM: Snapshot stored, 4,592 KB

9/21/2005 8:39:52 PM: Comparing / on nl-ams99a-das01

9/21/2005 8:40:24 PM: Execution completed successfully

Completed: 10 files, 24 KB

Performance: 0.1 MB/minute (0.2 copy, 0.1 compare)

Duration: 00:26:25 (00:25:50 idle/loading/preparing)

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Wot? More than 25 minutes to prepare the backup of 24 kilo bytes?! That can't be right! Even worse: another transfer (of 26 kilo bytes) needed more than 40 minutes!

 

The odd things is that when the system need to backup anything substantial (or at least more than a megabyte) the preparation times drop like mad... or actually, like they should.

 

So, what heck is Retrospect doing during its so-called preparation anyway? Any hints/suggestions? I'd really like to get our backup times down, since right now they're taking up too much time.

 

Could this be caused by bad NIC speed settings? We've had some trouble with those and the problem seems to occur on hosts that have had problems with their NIC speeds in the past. The clients in question run Solaris 8 (and we all know how finicky their half/full duplex settings can be with autoneg switches).

 

So, any information would be highly welcome!

 

Cheers!

 

 

Thomas

[tsluyter]

By the way, I've just stamped out the last of our duplex-troubles... But I'd still love to know what happens during the "preparation" phase...

[natew]

Hi

 

Chances are Retrospect is building the snapshot. That can take a while especially if you are backing up a server.

 

Thanks

nate